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PEACE CELEBRATIONS 

AND 

SERBIA 



THE MARTYRDOM OF OUR LITTLE ALLY 



By 

MRS. M. A. ST. CLAIR STOBART, 
Commissioner of the Serbian Red Cross Society in Great Britain. 



Reprinted from The London Times. 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 
1919 



or ®f ®« 

MAV 29 1920 






PEACE CELEBRATIONS AND SERBIA, 



The Martyrdom of Our Little Ally. 



I From The London Times, August 23rd, 1919.J 

To the Editor of The Times: 

Sir — I returned recently from a tour in Serbia, having been 
commissioned by the Serbian Red Cross Society in Great Britain to 
report upon the desirability of re-establishing the scheme of road- 
side dispensaries, which proved of such service to the peasants in 
1915. Before the war, owing to information from tainted sources, 
many people used to picture Serbia as a barren mountain land inhab- 
ited by semi-savages. But it is truly a land of "hope and glory." 
It is a land blessed with fertile valleys, broad rivers and wooded 
mountains; with orchards, which in the semi-tropical sun gleam with 
the rich purple of the plums, or the crimson of the cherries; and, 
above all, with endless acres of the green, shining "kukuruz" maize, 
or Indian corn — the staple food, the mainstay of Serbian life. And 
one marvels, in driving through the country today, at finding that 
so much of the land is cultivated. But the difficulty of labour 
shortage and scarcity of implements has been overcome by the 
Serbian custom of working the fields in co-operation. For even where 
the old Zadruga, or co-operative family life, is not in vogue, the 
heads of families meet and decide that tomorrow all hands shall hoe 
A's cornfields, that on Tuesday B's vineyards or C's orchards shall 
be tilled — with the result that double the work is done in half the 
time. 

It is no wonder that the Serbian peasant loves his land and loves 
to work upon it. Striking, indeed, is the contrast between the beauty 
of this country as God made it and the desolation of the homesteads 



4 M. A. ST. CLAIR STOBART 

caused by the man — the German-Austro-Bulgar man. The Report 
of the International Commission on Bulgarian Atrocities — in itself a 
terrible indictment of the Bulgarian people — only reveals examples 
of the crimes committed. By degrees, however, truth is coming to 
light, and last week in my presence another small portion of the 
dark veil was lifted to disclose crimes from which decent-minded 
devils would have shrunk. 

Accompanied by Colonel Dr. G., who had been my chief as head 
of the Army Medical Service in 1915, I had visited the Shumadia 
district, and on behalf of the Serbian Red Cross had arranged to 
reopen roadside dispensaries in the villages around Kragujevatz, for 
the health of the generations that will be responsible for the founda- 
tion of the new Serbian State seems to us to be of first importance. 
Owing to years of privation and neglect, the physical condition of 
the people is pitiable. At Parachin, for instance, in East Serbia, a 
doctor told us that 80 per cent of his patients are suffering from 
tuberculosis as the result of starvation and exposure. This doctor 
implored us to come and help him by opening small hospitals at 
Parachin and at Bolievatz, near the Bulgarian frontier, and dis- 
pensaries in the large country district between these towns. He is 
at present alone in an empty house, which has been robbed by the 
Bulgars of all its contents; he has only a tiny cupboardful of 
medicines, half a dozen instruments, and no means of reaching the 
outlying villages, which are crying for help. If, therefore, money is 
forthcoming, the Serbian Red Cross will start this work a once. 

This district has felt the full weight of Bulgar atrocities, and the 
prefect of Parachin, a judicial-minded, unemotional, quiet-speaking 
man, drove with us through the devastated villages and gave us 
opportunities of speaking with the representative villagers. 

We found that everywhere during their occupation the Bulgars 
had maltreated women and murdered men. In the village of D., 
for instance, the mayor and eight others had been shot on suspicion 
of giving food to peasants hiding in the mountains. Five others 
were first wounded and then thrown into a house, which was set 
on fire. And here, as everywhere else under Bulgar rule, the neigh- 



PEACE CELEBRATIONS AND SERBIA 5 

bouring priests — a dozen men — had been murdered in cold blood. 
Finally, after the Armistice, the Bulgars, when they were ordered 
to retreat, set fire to the villages and deliberately burned even the 
garnered corn. 

In one village 104 houses had been destroyed. Here I noticed 
a peasant standing gazing at a heap of bricks and ashes. "He is 
looking," explained the prefect, "at the place where stood his six 
houses. Now he has nothing." So the people are herding together 
in the few remaining rooms, and until next harvest are living upon 
stale biscuits or anything else they can obtain. I went into a room 
which had been improvised as a dwelling, half under ground. In 
this small space thirteen people had their home. On either side of 
the dark, windowless cabin planks nailed on wood props served as 
beds. Six people slept on one side, and seven on the floor. There 
were no mattresses, no coverings, no furniture, and no utensils except 
a small kettle, which was coming to the boil on some lighted sticks 
in the middle of the floor. 

And everywhere you could take for granted that no one had 
any clothes other than those in which they stood; and, indeed, 
everything we saw and heard was strictly in keeping with the inten- 
tion expressed in Bulgarian newspapers that "there should be no 
more Serbs." 

The full tale of devilry committed by the Bulgars will never be 
told. It is buried in the hidden graves of many thousand victims — 
as the following experience will show: 

After a long day of harrowing scenes, our friend, the prefect, dined 
with us outside our little cafe-hotel, in the narrow streets at Parachin. 
During the course of conversation he mentioned in his matter-of-fact 
way, as though it were a part of his ordinary routine work, that the 
next day he was going to superintend the exhumation of some 
bodies of young Serbian men said by an old peasant to have been 
murdered ?nd buried by the Bulgars in a wood on the hill behind 
the town. Should we care to be present at the exhumation? We 
accepted the suggestion, and next morning, under the directions of 
the old shepherd, we, with the prefect and the doctor and the grave- 



6 M. A. ST. CLAIR STOBART 

digger, made our way to the oak scrub-wood behind the town, and 
digging was begun. The old shepherd told us that from his house 
he had one night seen some Bulgars carry away four young Serbian 
men, aged respectively 30, 20, 18 and 15. So he watched from a 
distance, and saw that a grave was dug; the Serbs were placed 
sitting on the edge, their feet dangling in the grave, their hands 
tied behind their backs, and then the Bulgars, with long knives, came 
behind them and cut their throats — the Bulgar method, as it makes 
less noise than shooting; the bodies were thrown in the pit, which 
was then covered with earth. There was nothing when we arrived 
to indicate the grave, but the old peasant was certain of the spot. 
We watched in silence while the gravedigger threw out a couple of 
feet of earth, then we heard the spade strike something hard. "Take 
care, take care!" He stopped and lifted out a skull — two, three, four 
skulls, and bones; the bones of four bodies all huddled indiscrimi- 
nately into a half-sized grave. The doctor, with his instruments, ex- 
amined some bones. Obviously, he said, these were the bones of a 
youth of 15 or 16. Remnants of a straw hat showed that the crime 
had been committed in summer as the shepherd had said. The 
story was sufficently proved; the prefect quietly told the gravedigger 
to replace the bones; we said "Zbogom" to the old peasant and 
went back to the hotel to lunch. 

And after lunch we understood why such tragedies were accepted 
by the Serbs as commonplaces of everyday life. The prefect took us 
to a large building at the end of the street. Through a courtyard, we 
entered a high, barnlike room. Into this the Bulgars had been in the 
habit of carrying off their victiitis, who were never seen again. The 
windows were stuffed with mattresses and straw to deaden the sound. 
Round the walls inside we noticed writings, names scribbled evidently 
in the hope that relations would one day read and understand. One 
man wrote, in tiny script, that five Serbs were at that moment lying 
there dead; the manner of their death he could not disclose, but he 
hoped that some day — 

And surely now this day has come? Not for vengeance to the 
Bulgars. "Vengeance is mine. I will repay," said the Lord, but for 



PEACE CELEBRATIONS AND SERBIA 7 

reparation to the Serbs. Now that the war is over and Qermany is 
safely defeated, we are apt to forget that if the Serbs had surrendered 
and come to terms — any terms — with the enemy, at the tragic moment, 
when, instead, they faced annihilation in the mountains of Montenegro 
and Albania rather than be false to their Allies, the Bulgars would 
have overrun Greece, the Allies would then have had no foothold in 
Salonica from which to make the ultimate advance upon the Bul- 
garians. Then the Bulgarians would not have surrendered; and if 
Bulgaria had not surrendered, Turkey would not have surrendered; if 
Turkey had not surrendered, Austria would not have surrendered, and 
the armies of all these Powers would have been free to harass us in 
Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, possibly in India; and who knows but 
that the Pan-German Empire, which was already established from 
Hamburg to Constantinople, might today still be in existence? 

For those of us who have been in Serbia since the Armistice and 
have seen the desolation, the hushed sorrow, the privations there being 
bravely and silently endured, there is only one way of celebrating 
Peace, and that is by straining every nerve to remedy the result of 
war amongst those people whose sacrifices, loyalty, and endurance 
were main factors in the establishment of Peace. 

Yours truly, 
M. A. ST. CLAIR STOBART. 
7, Turner's Wood, 
Hampstead Garden Suburb, 

N. W. 4, 
London, England. 



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